There’s nothing like getting drawn into a game in such a way that you don’t see the TV screen anymore; you become completely wrapped up and your whole living room just disappears. You become one with the world of your game and totally immersed; time passes by in a strange way, it’s not a constant anymore, it goes all wobbly. That thing that you experience is the true sign of a great game but even the great games have holes in them. Not bugs or glitches, these holes are much harder to get past. I’m talking about the things that are so hard to believe you can’t help but make a “pffffft” noise. Now I’m not an idiot, I know there is a suspension of disbelief required for playing games. I have no problem believing things like an Italian plumber being able to beat the crap out of a dinosaur and I’m ok with having my body sucked out into space then being re-grown from a small piece of DNA found underwater by a tiny robot.

I don’t question things like that; I don’t feel that I need to, they fit and seem right. Every so often though there will be something that happens in a game that unravels the whole thing for me it and I find myself back in my living room. Below are some of those things that appear in video games from time to time that can only be classed as bollocks.

Soap McTavish – Call of Duty Modern Warfare

A man who has saved the world from itself on two separate occasions, a man who has the balls to jump across a fifteen foot gap at the top of a mountain armed with nothing more than two ice picks and a man who’s so ‘ard he’s in the special air service. That’s right – John Soap McTavish, who would be believable if it wasn’t for one thing, his hair. Look at it… It’s bollocks! There’s no way that other members of the SAS wouldn’t rip the piss out of him for that. I’m not talking Ross Kemp’s “Super Army Soldiers” either, I’m talking the real gruff blokes that could break into your house, steal your cat and stab you in the back while you’re sitting down. Blokes like the real hero of the game, founder of the “English Guy with a Moustache Archetype” and grower of quite possibly the greatest facial hair ever to feature in a game, Captain Price… who doesn’t pass comment on your hair cut when you break him out of prison.

“What the fuck is that on your head sunshine?”
Listen you can almost hear him say it… and that’s why Soap McTavish is bollocks.

The SCPD – Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

The taxes in Seacrest County must be biblical! I can understand the fuzz needing fast cars to be able to catch those pesky racers that do nothing all day but race around the near empty roads terrorizing the poor bastards in Nissan pickups that have somehow become trapped in this strange place. Do the SCPD really need to use Porsche Cayenne Turbos for roadblocks though? Would some random crap shack on wheels not prove just as effective? Those cars are £83,778 a pop and that’s before they have attached lights to the top and stuck stickers all over them. That means the average roadblock costs just under half a million quid and any one pursuit could cost the poor tax payer of Seacrest County more than 2 million in road blocks alone!

Stick the cost of a 12 million dollar helicopter, fuel and pilot training on top and then the prices for the four super cop cars that will be destroyed by the end of the race and you’ve got one hell of an expensive car chase. The 12 million dollar helicopter pretty much cancels itself out too; why have an air unit whose main purpose is to get in front of the offending rich kid and covertly drop a spike strip in the road if they are just going to hover over it and give its position away? If I was flying the chopper I wouldn’t even bother setting the spike strips to open I’d just fire the closed units at the car I’m trying to make stop; those things in their closed container must weigh as much as a child and would cut through a super car’s roof like tin foil. That might be why they took my wings off me though.

The Sabre Programme – Halo Reach

“A good place to look might be… I don’t know, the nearest nonexistent launch site in the nonexistent Sabre Program, dismissed by three administrations as preposterous rumour… And in which our newest member was certainly never a pilot.” – Kat B320

I do love Halo, which is not one of my best kept secrets, but this bloody cut scene in Halo: Reach drives me fucking nuts; it’s bollocks for many reasons. Just look at the size of the building. It’s huge, you can’t even see all of it in that picture and there are more installations like it, you can see them in the distance as you’re taking off later on in the level. No government is stupid enough to deny a building you can see from fifty miles away, not even the Korean one, ok well maybe the Korean one. The other thing that makes it bollocks it the fact it’s a “secret” in the first place. So what, you have armed aircraft capable of space flight. What’s the secret here? Is it the weapons these super secret space craft are armed with? If so, which one? The machine gun, or the missiles? Neither are anything new and, from the average Reach pedestrian’s point of view, mankind would have been strapping rockets and guns to things that fly for the best part of 600 years.

Maybe it’s the fact that they are capable of space flight? I can kind of see the government not wanting Reach’s inhabitants to know about the possibility of man going into space at least until it actually works. That way they can shout “Surprise! Look we went into space!” and everybody shout “WOW you’re awesome, I’ll be voting for you next time” and “I can’t believe we have reached a point in human history where we can go into space, this really is an historic moment”. Which wouldn’t be so hard to swallow…
…if they didn’t happen to already be on another planet.

Zombie Apocalypse – Left 4 Dead games

As much as I love Left 4 Dead, there are a few things in it which strike me as complete bollocks. I’m ok with the zombie outbreak as a whole; I’ve no issues with that and I can even go with the others not shooting Nick on sight for dressing like a tosser. It’s the whole idea of the survivors that I have a problem with; where the fuck are they going? It doesn’t make any sense. At the start of Left 4 Dead 2 you find yourself on a roof with a pile of ammo, a table full of weapons, a stack of health packs and only one point of entry. I couldn’t think of a safer place to be during a zombie outbreak. Oh wait yes I can; some kind of safe room with big steel doors at either end, a table full of guns, a stash of medical packs on the wall and a big pile of ammo on the floor. I admit it would make for a pretty shitty sequel and Valve really would have had some fanboy rage on their hands if they’d of shipped it like this but had there been a “Lee” in Left 4 Dead 2 he’d have said “Fuck that I’m staying here, shut the door after you”.
He would also listen to Ellis stories.

The Passing of Time – Fable III

As most of you know, the game is split into two halves; in the first half you don’t really notice the passing of time as it’s not important, but when you become king there becomes a sense of urgency. Albion is going to get attacked, you have just one year to straighten the whole kingdom out and prepare your citizens before the spooky goo arrives to do something really horrible that you never learn about. During this year you’ll have the royal agenda and a dick of a butler to keep you on track. He’ll present you with the royal agenda which is basically a list with three “quests” on it. The three “quests” are normally split between making really hard moral decisions (imagine me saying that with a sarcastic face on) and going off questing, then after you’ve completed the things from the royal agenda time effectively moves on. The passing of time at this point in Fable III however is not as consistent as you would expect it to be; it’s more like a crap episode of Star Trek Voyager where time goes all wobbly and it’s somehow Seven Of Nine’s fault that they got trapped in the Delta Quadrant (+10 geek points to you if you know the episode in question). It takes thirty days to decide what to do with your brother, set the taxes, and decide what you want to do with the old quarter but in actual gameplay time we’re taking ten to fifteen minutes tops and that includes trying to get one of the castle’s maids into bed.

I can live with that though; there’s still plenty of time to get your shit together before the spooky goo attack. It goes on for another three sections or “royal agendas” with time dropping by 30, 40 and then 80 days until you reach the 121 days left mark. “Ahhh I’ve got ages left still and I’ve nearly filled the treasury with gold” you tell yourself but, sadly, this is not the case and after completing two boring arse things on the agenda the spooky goo attacks! Oh no, don’t misunderstand me, it hasn’t attacked early… that just wouldn’t be cricket; Lionhead Studios just felt the need to jump 120 days into the future and effectively end the game. Lucky for me I’d invested early in property so I had a big mountain of money and my people were saved (and I got the achievement – let’s be honest, that’s all this is about). I had friends who lost everything at this point due to the unexpected end though and now they are doomed to wander an empty kingdom where the small handful of people that did make it hate them.

It’s as if Peter Molyneux forgot he had to hand it in and finished it on the bus on the ride in to work one day. It leaves you feeling deflated by the whole experience, and all you can remember is the end, like spending ages reading an article on a website that you quite enjoyed and it coming to a sudden

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